From the All Things Considered Mailbag:
MELISSA BLOCK, host: It's time now for some of your recent letters. First off, last week, we aired a Planet Money story about how a eurozone country might safely get rid of the euro and reestablish its old currency. A British businessman, Simon Wolfson, is offering a prize of $400,000 for a good answer to that dilemma.
Wolfson told us he doesn't want the euro to fall apart. This contest is just a lifeboat in case it does.
SIMON WOLFSON: And, you know, no ship ever sunk for having too many lifeboats.
BLOCK: Well, that caught the ear of listener, Ben Vernaugh(ph) of Chicago, who points out that a ship did, in fact, once sink for having too many lifeboats. He sent us this nautical note about an incident in his city in 1915. He writes, the S.S. Eastland, a passenger ship with a top-heavy design, made even more unstable by the addition of a large number of lifeboats, capsized while docked on the Chicago River. Eight hundred forty-four lives were lost.
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